NAMM SHOW REPORT 2018

Details

Published: 06 February 2018

Winter NAMM 2018 may have been the biggest and noisiest ever!

It was the first time exhibiting for Scuffham Amps and our booth was located right in the heart of the guitar hall where ambient noise SPL exceeded 100dB much of the time. Basically a hostile playing and listening environment, even with headphones!

Here's our report from the show including news of what to expect form S-GEAR development in 2018...

NAMM REPORT

NAMM is traditionally a show for dealers and manufacturers to meet and do business. However, it's become a lot more than that in recent years with social media firing up more public interest in the show. For a small company like Scuffham, the attraction of being at NAMM is to connect with musicians, producers and other people working within the musical instrument industry. The show did not disappoint on this level, we had the opportunity to meet and talk with S-GEAR users, discuss guitars, amps, recording, performance and the future of S-GEAR. Very notably it was great to meet Eric Lambert (aka Elambo, long time Scuffham forum moderator and creative director at Earhole studios).

We were fortunate to have two very experienced demo guitarists on the booth in Anaheim, UK based guitarist Jerry Stevenson and NY based guitarist Brad Craig. Both Brad and Jerry have used S-GEAR extensively in session work and on their own projects.

MAKING OUR OWN NOISE

S-GEAR running into a Mission Engineering Gemini managed to cut through the noise, Berklee graduate and awesome guitar talent David Blitt stopped by the booth, grabbed my PRS singlecut and shredded this piece with the Wayfarer...

WHAT'S HAPPENING WITH SCUFFHAM DEVELOPMENT?

2016 and 2017 were largely focused on re-development of the core Scuffham Amps modelling technologies, including revisited tube modelling algorithms and more detailed power amp and speaker modelling approaches. The results of this work will be rolled into future Scuffham products.

It became clear that some re-work of the S-GEAR User Interface was necessary before we could introduce any further amps, pedals or rack effects into the product. The latter part of 2017 focused on this revision of the S-GEAR User Interface, responding to much of the feedback we have recieved about the useability of S-GEAR v1 & v2. The results of this UI re-work will be available soon in the form of S-GEAR v2.9.

S-GEAR v2.9 PREVIEW

S-GEAR v2.9 was on preview at the show. This version is scheduled for relesae in the spring and includes a heavily re-worked User Interface built on updated software libraries.

Here are some of the improvements to be found in the forthcoming v2.9 :

WHAT TO EXPECT IN 2018

(updated November 2018)

S-GEAR v2.9 will be released in winter of 2018/2019, including the improvements and re-work described above. S-GEAR v2.9 will be a free update to anyone who purchased (or purchases) S-GEAR in the 12 months preceeding the v2.9 release. For other existing customers there will be a small upgrade fee (to be announced).

THANK YOU!

Thank you to everyone who visited our booth during the show. Meeting face to face with so many S-GEAR users made the show every bit worthwhile.